What this means for our understanding of the Americas is that the demographic map of the continent was more dynamic, more subject to change, and more complicated than the archaeological record alone could reveal.

Before ancient DNA, the best available evidence suggested that the populations of the Bogotá Altiplano were broadly related to the other highland populations of the Andes, part of a continuous human occupation stretching from northern Colombia to the southern tip of South America.

The genetics reveals instead a history of distinct populations, genetic replacement, and demographic transformation — a history invisible to archaeology because the bones of the Herrera-period and Muisca-period individuals gave no visible indication of their genetic distance from their Preceramic predecessors.

The Checua people were part of that story.